Biodiversity and Sustainable Development
- NOTOC**
Biodiversity and Sustainable Development
Biodiversity is a foundation of sustainable development because human societies and economies ultimately depend on functioning ecosystems. Genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity support food production, freshwater supplies, fertile soils, pollination, climate regulation, disease regulation, livelihoods, economic activity, cultural values, and resilience to environmental change. Biodiversity therefore extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of conservation policy.
Research and international development institutions increasingly describe biodiversity as relevant to the entire Sustainable Development Goals framework rather than only to goals explicitly concerned with oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. Progress on poverty reduction, hunger, health, clean water, sustainable cities, climate action, employment, inequality, and economic development can all depend on the condition of natural systems.
This relationship also operates in the opposite direction. Economic development, infrastructure, agriculture, energy production, urbanization, trade, and patterns of consumption can either protect or degrade biodiversity. Sustainable development therefore requires development strategies that recognize ecological limits while attempting to improve human well-being.
Biodiversity and the Sustainable Development Goals
Biodiversity contributes directly and indirectly to all of the Sustainable Development Goals. Ecosystems provide resources and services that support food, water, health, employment, economic security, climate resilience, and human well-being. This makes biodiversity conservation an important component of development policy rather than an isolated environmental objective.
The interdependence among the goals is particularly important. Actions designed to improve one sector can affect biodiversity and consequently influence other development objectives. Agricultural expansion may increase food production while damaging forests, freshwater systems, or wildlife habitat. Infrastructure may improve transportation and economic opportunity while fragmenting ecosystems. Renewable-energy development can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions while creating new ecological pressures if projects are poorly located.
Integrated planning seeks to recognize these connections before policies are implemented. Rather than treating biodiversity, climate, agriculture, health, water, and economic development as separate policy areas, sustainable-development strategies increasingly examine them as interconnected systems.
Poverty Reduction, Livelihoods, and Equity
Many communities depend directly on forests, fisheries, agricultural landscapes, wildlife, wetlands, coastal ecosystems, and other natural resources for food, income, fuel, materials, and employment. Biodiversity loss can therefore intensify poverty by weakening the ecological systems on which households depend.
Conservation and poverty reduction can sometimes reinforce one another. Sustainable forestry, fisheries management, ecotourism, ecosystem restoration, and community-based natural-resource management can provide livelihoods while maintaining ecological functions. However, conservation can also impose costs when communities lose access to land or resources or bear the costs of wildlife damage without receiving corresponding benefits.
Equity is consequently an essential component of biodiversity policy. Effective conservation requires consideration of land ownership, access to resources, gender, income, local institutions, benefit-sharing, and the distribution of environmental costs and benefits.
Development programs that protect biodiversity without addressing these social dimensions may shift conservation costs onto communities that are least able to absorb them.
Agriculture, Food Security, and Biodiversity
Biodiversity forms the biological foundation of food and agricultural systems. Crop varieties, livestock breeds, soil organisms, pollinators, predators, microorganisms, forests, fisheries, and aquatic ecosystems all contribute to food production.
Agricultural biodiversity supports soil fertility, pollination, pest regulation, nutrient cycling, water management, resilience to climate stress, and genetic resources for future crop and livestock development. Diverse agricultural systems can also improve dietary diversity and provide farmers with additional sources of income.
Intensive agricultural systems can simultaneously become major drivers of biodiversity loss through habitat conversion, pesticide use, pollution, water consumption, and landscape simplification. Sustainable food systems therefore require a balance between agricultural production and ecological protection.
Agroecology, agricultural diversification, multifunctional landscapes, conservation of genetic resources, and biodiversity-sensitive land management represent approaches intended to maintain production while strengthening ecological resilience.
The relationship between biodiversity and food security also extends through international trade. Trade can shift agricultural pressure among regions, sometimes reducing pressure on biodiversity-rich landscapes while potentially transferring environmental impacts elsewhere.
Climate Resilience, Water, and Nature-Based Solutions
Biodiversity and climate change are closely connected. Healthy forests, wetlands, grasslands, coastal ecosystems, soils, and other natural systems store carbon while also helping communities adapt to environmental change.
Nature-based solutions seek to protect, restore, or sustainably manage ecosystems in ways that address societal challenges. Potential benefits include carbon sequestration, flood regulation, erosion control, improved water quality, reduced disaster risk, food security, habitat protection, and greater resilience to droughts, storms, and other climate-related hazards.
Freshwater ecosystems are particularly important because ecological integrity supports water supply, sanitation, agriculture, public health, and economic activity. Wetlands, forests, vegetation, and healthy watersheds can function as natural infrastructure alongside engineered systems.
Nature-based solutions are not automatically beneficial. Poorly designed projects can create ecological or social trade-offs. Effective projects require biodiversity safeguards, appropriate ecological knowledge, community participation, long-term monitoring, financing, and adaptive management.
Ecosystem Restoration
Restoring degraded ecosystems has become an important strategy connecting biodiversity conservation with sustainable development. Restoration can rebuild habitats and ecological functions while also supporting carbon storage, water supplies, agricultural productivity, erosion control, livelihoods, and human health.
Forests, wetlands, grasslands, rivers, coastal systems, agricultural landscapes, and marine ecosystems can all be targets for restoration.
Biodiversity itself is an important measure of restoration success. Increasing tree cover or vegetation alone does not necessarily recreate a functioning ecosystem. Monocultures or poorly designed restoration projects may provide some environmental benefits while supporting far less biodiversity than naturally diverse ecosystems.
Successful restoration therefore considers species diversity, ecological processes, landscape connectivity, local environmental conditions, community participation, monitoring, and long-term management.
Biodiversity, Human Health, and Well-Being
Human health depends on ecological systems in numerous ways. Biodiversity contributes to food and nutrition, clean water, medicines, climate regulation, air quality, disease regulation, and the stability of ecosystems on which communities rely.
Biodiversity loss can affect health through environmental degradation, reduced food security, malnutrition, changing infectious-disease dynamics, declining water quality, and increased vulnerability to climate-related hazards.
Interactions with nature can also contribute to mental, emotional, cultural, social, and spiritual well-being. Urban green spaces and biodiversity-rich environments may therefore provide both ecological and public-health benefits.
These relationships have encouraged greater integration of biodiversity policy with public health, urban planning, climate adaptation, food policy, and environmental management.
Biodiversity Finance, Natural Capital, and Economic Development
Economic activity depends extensively on natural capital even when those dependencies do not appear in conventional financial accounts. Agriculture depends on soils, water, pollination, and genetic resources. Fisheries depend on healthy aquatic ecosystems. Tourism may depend on wildlife and landscapes. Businesses and infrastructure depend on reliable water supplies, stable climates, natural resources, and functioning ecosystems.
Natural-capital accounting attempts to make these dependencies more visible in economic decision-making.
Biodiversity finance includes public spending, development assistance, private investment, blended finance, conservation funds, payments for ecosystem services, green financial instruments, restoration finance, and other mechanisms intended to mobilize capital for nature.
Despite increasing attention, available biodiversity finance remains substantially below estimated needs. Another challenge is ensuring that financial mechanisms generate measurable ecological improvements rather than merely producing environmental claims.
Financing biodiversity is therefore increasingly viewed not simply as conservation spending but as investment in economic resilience, food systems, water security, climate adaptation, livelihoods, and long-term prosperity.
Corporate Biodiversity Risk and Accountability
Biodiversity loss is emerging as a financial and corporate risk. Companies can depend on ecosystem services while simultaneously creating pressures on the ecosystems that support their operations.
Nature-related risks can affect supply chains, access to resources, operating costs, credit conditions, investment performance, insurance, and long-term business resilience. Financial institutions can also become exposed to biodiversity risks through the companies and sectors they finance.
Corporate biodiversity reporting and nature-related disclosure are expanding, but evidence suggests that measurement and accountability remain uneven. Many corporate biodiversity commitments lack sufficiently specific targets, transparent indicators, or measurable outcomes.
The growth of biodiversity disclosure reflects a broader shift in which ecosystem degradation is increasingly considered a material economic and financial issue rather than solely an environmental concern.
Governance and Biodiversity Mainstreaming
Biodiversity mainstreaming involves incorporating ecological considerations into government planning, budgets, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, infrastructure, development cooperation, tourism, energy, and other sectors.
National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans provide one mechanism for coordinating biodiversity policy, while public budgeting and development planning can connect national priorities with international commitments such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Effective mainstreaming requires coordination among ministries, local governments, businesses, financial institutions, scientists, communities, and civil society. Monitoring and measurable outcomes are also important because policy commitments alone do not guarantee ecological improvement.
A central principle of mainstreaming is that biodiversity should influence major economic and development decisions before ecological damage occurs rather than being addressed only afterward through conservation or restoration programs.
Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities
Indigenous peoples and local communities play major roles in biodiversity stewardship around the world. Their contributions can include land management, monitoring, governance, traditional ecological knowledge, resource management, restoration, and long-term stewardship.
Evidence increasingly supports moving beyond conservation models in which communities are merely consulted about externally designed projects. Indigenous-led and community-based approaches emphasize rights, governance authority, ownership, local knowledge, and meaningful participation in decision-making.
Combining Indigenous, local, and scientific knowledge can improve understanding of ecosystems while increasing the legitimacy and effectiveness of natural-resource policy.
At the same time, local communities frequently bear significant costs associated with conservation, including wildlife damage, restrictions on resource use, and lost economic opportunities. Equitable conservation therefore requires fair benefit-sharing, recognition of rights, compensation where appropriate, and meaningful participation in governance.
Oceans, Forests, and Rural Economies
Marine, coastal, freshwater, and forest biodiversity support millions of livelihoods and contribute to food security, employment, tourism, trade, climate regulation, and local economies.
Small-scale fisheries illustrate the close relationship between biodiversity and sustainable development. Healthy aquatic ecosystems can support food production and livelihoods, while excessive fishing pressure and ecological degradation can undermine both environmental and economic sustainability.
Forests similarly provide biodiversity habitat while supporting water regulation, soil fertility, carbon storage, food, materials, energy, and rural livelihoods.
Community-based fisheries management, sustainable forestry, ecotourism, protected areas, and ecosystem restoration can connect conservation with economic development, but outcomes depend heavily on governance, local participation, ecological conditions, and the distribution of benefits.
Cities, Infrastructure, and the Energy Transition
Urbanization and infrastructure development have major implications for biodiversity. Roads, buildings, energy systems, and urban expansion can destroy or fragment habitats, alter water systems, increase pollution, and change ecological processes.
At the same time, biodiversity can improve urban environments. Parks, urban forests, wetlands, ponds, green roofs, vegetation, and blue-green infrastructure can provide habitat while supporting stormwater management, cooling, recreation, climate resilience, and human well-being.
Infrastructure planning can therefore attempt to meet development needs while avoiding or minimizing ecological damage.
The energy transition presents similar challenges. Renewable energy is necessary for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but wind, solar, transmission, and other infrastructure can affect species and habitats. Biodiversity-sensitive siting, environmental assessment, mitigation, community participation, and ecological monitoring can reduce these conflicts.
Sustainable infrastructure requires consideration of ecological impacts from the beginning of the planning process rather than treating biodiversity protection as an afterthought.
Nature-Positive Development
Nature-positive development seeks to move beyond slowing biodiversity decline toward economic and social systems that contribute to the recovery of ecosystems.
Strategies associated with this approach include ecosystem restoration, sustainable agriculture, improved natural-resource governance, biodiversity finance, natural-capital accounting, subsidy reform, sustainable supply chains, conservation, corporate accountability, and stronger integration of biodiversity into public and private decision-making.
The concept reflects growing recognition that economic prosperity cannot be separated indefinitely from the ecological systems supporting it.
Achieving nature-positive development nevertheless requires more than new terminology. Policies must produce measurable improvements in ecosystem condition while respecting community rights and addressing the underlying economic incentives that drive biodiversity loss.
Conclusion
Biodiversity and sustainable development are fundamentally interconnected. Biodiversity supports food production, water security, climate resilience, health, employment, livelihoods, economic activity, cultural values, and many other components of human well-being. Its decline can consequently undermine progress across numerous Sustainable Development Goals.
The evidence also shows that conservation cannot succeed through protected areas or species programs alone. Agriculture, finance, infrastructure, urban planning, energy, trade, public health, development policy, and corporate decision-making all influence biodiversity.
Sustainable development therefore requires biodiversity to become part of mainstream economic and social planning. Protecting ecosystems, restoring degraded landscapes, supporting Indigenous and community stewardship, mobilizing finance, improving corporate accountability, and designing biodiversity-sensitive food, energy, and infrastructure systems can simultaneously advance conservation and human development.
The broader lesson is that nature is not external to development. Healthy economies and societies exist within functioning ecological systems. Maintaining and restoring biodiversity is consequently not only an environmental objective but a long-term investment in human prosperity, resilience, and well-being.
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Biodiversity, SDGs, Governance, and Implementation
Provides development practitioners with practical approaches for incorporating biodiversity, soil, water, climate adaptation, mitigation, resilience, monitoring, and socioeconomic considerations into agricultural projects.
Uses country examples to show how biodiversity programming can support climate resilience, gender empowerment, livelihoods, inclusive growth, governance, and implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
Highlights expanding tools and evidence supporting implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework in agriculture, fisheries, genetic-resource conservation, food security, benefit sharing, and sustainable development.
Highlights the importance of crop, livestock, forest, aquatic, and other genetic resources for climate-resilient agriculture and calls for policy coherence, Indigenous knowledge, finance, monitoring, and institutional coordination.
Explains how pollinators support food production, healthy diets, ecosystem functioning, resilient landscapes, rural livelihoods, and wider ecological processes and argues for stronger integration into biodiversity policy.
Describes a nature-positive urban-development initiative integrating green neighborhoods, climate resilience, investment, urban planning, low-carbon development, and improved living conditions in Nairobi.
Describes work in Madagascar, Mexico, and Uganda to improve policy coherence, institutions, financial incentives, biodiversity-friendly farming practices, knowledge sharing, and implementation of national biodiversity strategies.
- UNDP Nature Pledge Annual Report 2024 | UNDP | United Nations Development Programme | April 25, 2025
Reviews nature-related programs across more than one hundred countries and describes efforts to change how nature is valued, redirect financial flows, reform policy, and integrate biodiversity into development.
Describes integrated ecosystem management approaches linking biodiversity with climate adaptation, land and water management, food security, livelihoods, poverty reduction, and multiple Sustainable Development Goals.
Provides a national example of aligning biodiversity financing with economic and social development planning, national biodiversity strategies, SDGs, and implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Examines land degradation as a threat to agricultural production, rural livelihoods, ecosystem functioning, and food security and evaluates policy options for avoiding, reducing, and reversing degradation.
Shows governments how public budgets can be tied to measurable biodiversity outcomes and emphasizes integration across agriculture, fisheries, tourism, forestry, and other economic sectors affecting nature.
- SDGs at the halfway mark | Nature Ecology & Evolution | Nature Ecology & Evolution | October 2, 2023
Assesses biodiversity at the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda and argues that meaningful progress requires treating the SDGs as interconnected because biodiversity contributes directly or indirectly to every one of the goals.
Brings together researchers and practitioners to identify priorities for accelerating protection and sustainable management of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems during the remaining years of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Evaluates global progress toward the biodiversity-related SDGs over a decade, finding uneven advances across terrestrial and marine targets and particularly significant implementation challenges facing lower-income countries.
Explains why biodiversity and healthy ecosystems form a foundation for sustainable development and maps their contributions across the entire 2030 Agenda rather than limiting biodiversity policy to SDG 14 and SDG 15.
Examines China's biodiversity policies in relation to SDG implementation and considers how conservation goals, socioeconomic development, climate action, and the emerging global biodiversity framework can be better coordinated.
Proposes sustainable-development targets that explicitly recognize feedbacks among biodiversity, ecosystem services, societies, and economies, offering a framework for integrating ecological support systems more effectively into international development goals.
Reviews scientific evidence showing that biodiversity contributes directly and indirectly to achievement of all 17 Sustainable Development Goals through ecosystem services, food production, health, climate regulation, livelihoods, cultural benefits, and other contributions to human well-being.
Brings together guidance on biodiversity, poverty reduction, forests, tourism, National Biodiversity Strategies, and sustainable development for governments, development practitioners, planners, and other stakeholders.
Reviews major global assessments demonstrating that biodiversity underpins human well-being, livelihoods, ecosystem services, and progress toward most SDGs, arguing that biodiversity policy must be integrated across development sectors rather than treated separately.
Explores opportunities for embedding biodiversity within United Nations country programming and national development processes so ecosystem conservation and sustainable use become part of broader implementation of the 2030 Agenda.
Describes the CBD's Biodiversity for Development Initiative and its effort to integrate biodiversity into national development plans, poverty-reduction strategies, sector policies, National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, and development cooperation.
Provides practical tools connecting biodiversity to individual Sustainable Development Goals and supports governments and practitioners seeking to mainstream ecosystems into poverty alleviation, sectoral planning, development strategies, and public policy.
Examines biodiversity mainstreaming in national planning, budgets, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, development cooperation, monitoring, and evaluation, drawing lessons from sixteen predominantly megadiverse countries.
Provides examples of how biodiversity conservation, sustainable use, and ecosystem services contribute to achieving goals involving poverty, hunger, health, water, economic development, climate action, oceans, terrestrial ecosystems, and resilient communities.
Examines how development cooperation can simultaneously support biodiversity conservation, sustainable use, development, and poverty reduction through mainstreaming, improved monitoring, institutional coordination, and alignment with partner-country priorities.
Reviews public and private financing mechanisms that can connect biodiversity conservation with development, including environmental fiscal reform, ecosystem-service payments, green markets, conservation funds, governance reforms, and institutional capacity building.
Sets out a development approach that places nature at the center of governance, economics, finance, health, and conservation while helping countries accelerate implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Establishes criteria and indicators intended to ensure nature-based development projects produce genuine biodiversity, social, and economic benefits while remaining resilient, inclusive, measurable, and consistent with sustainable-development principles.
Poverty Reduction, Equity, and Livelihoods
Examines links between tropical forest biodiversity and household dependence on forest resources, emphasizing that conservation policies must account for poverty, resource dependence, livelihoods, and local development needs.
Examines economic strategies among households near a protected area in Madagascar and shows how land constraints, markets, natural-resource use, incomes, and human well-being interact with conservation objectives.
Synthesizes hundreds of conservation cases across dozens of countries, finding predominantly positive associations between conservation and poverty reduction while demonstrating that trade-offs among different dimensions of human well-being remain common.
Argues that biodiversity initiatives should move beyond simplistic approaches to gender by considering power, intersectionality, social relationships, and local institutions when designing equitable and effective conservation and sustainable-development programs.
Explains how billions of people rely directly on agriculture, forests, oceans, coastal ecosystems, and other biological resources and why biodiversity conservation is therefore integral to poverty reduction and sustainable development.
Describes how ecosystem services support rural livelihoods and how sustainable agriculture, fisheries, ecosystem restoration, and natural-resource management can increase income while reducing vulnerability to environmental and economic shocks.
Explores the dependence of vulnerable communities on ecosystem services and argues that biodiversity loss can deepen inequality and marginalization by reducing access to food, water, livelihoods, and other foundations of human well-being.
Connects biodiversity governance with social and economic inequality, emphasizing equitable benefit-sharing, recognition of traditional knowledge, and the roles of Indigenous peoples, local communities, and women as biodiversity custodians.
Connects wildlife and ecosystem conservation with food security, livelihoods, poverty reduction, tourism, fisheries, and economic development, particularly for rural populations whose incomes depend heavily on functioning natural systems.
Maps socioeconomic poverty indicators against global biodiversity hotspots and demonstrates the substantial geographic overlap between severe poverty and conservation priorities, underscoring the need for integrated development and biodiversity policy.
Indigenous Peoples, Local Communities, and Biodiversity
Examines biocultural conservation in northern Kenya as an alternative to exclusionary conservation models, emphasizing Indigenous governance, cultural relationships with landscapes, community rights, and social justice alongside biodiversity protection.
Presents knowledge co-assessment as a practical method for combining Indigenous, local, and scientific knowledge in natural-resource governance while increasing legitimacy, equity, inclusiveness, and usefulness for decision-makers.
Proposes integrated terrestrial-marine governance and blended finance that combine Indigenous knowledge, community participation, biodiversity conservation, resource management, and socioeconomic equity.
Describes efforts to incorporate Indigenous and local knowledge into national biodiversity governance, policy development, capacity building, and implementation of international biodiversity commitments.
Finds that Amazonian community-led fisheries management protects ecological areas far larger than the immediate managed sites, demonstrating substantial biodiversity benefits created by local stewardship despite communities bearing much of the financial cost.
Argues that protected-area policy should move toward greater Indigenous leadership, recognition of rights, local decision-making, and meaningful governance rather than treating communities primarily as participants in externally designed conservation programs.
Documents crop losses, livestock depredation, human-wildlife conflict, and other costs experienced by communities around protected areas, illustrating why conservation policy must account for local livelihoods and equitable compensation.
Reviews hundreds of empirical studies and finds that Indigenous peoples and local communities can play roles extending far beyond consultation, including governance, stewardship, management, monitoring, ownership, and decision-making.
Examines how community participation, benefit sharing, conservation institutions, livelihoods, and socioeconomic development interact around an Ethiopian protected area.
Evaluates conservation land leases through an equity and gender lens and finds that land ownership strongly determines participation and benefits, creating important implications for conservation-based rural development.
Agriculture, Food Systems, and Biodiversity
Presents an integrated approach for making Mediterranean olive production more resilient through soil conservation, water management, biodiversity, carbon stewardship, innovation, and sustainable agricultural practices.
Finds that agrifood-related actions appear across the National Biodiversity Strategies analyzed by FAO and calls for stronger policy alignment, financing, and implementation across food-producing sectors.
Connects farm demographics with biodiversity, crop diversification, rural resilience, and long-term agricultural sustainability and finds that younger farmers can play an important role in diversification transitions.
Maps agricultural diversity across California and examines its relationships with wildlife biodiversity, climate, agrochemical use, agricultural landscapes, and conservation incentives.
Synthesizes evidence showing that agricultural diversification can increase biodiversity and ecosystem services while improving long-term profitability, offering an important pathway toward economically viable sustainable farming.
Evaluates how within-field diversification affects pollinators, predators, other biodiversity, crop yields, and pest-control services, illustrating the trade-offs that must be considered during agroecological transitions.
Explains how systems thinking can help governments design food and agricultural policies that simultaneously address productivity, resilience, poverty, natural resources, biodiversity, climate pressures, and sustainability.
Evaluates a large-scale agroecological transition in India and finds that agricultural practices can deliver biodiversity and socioeconomic benefits while maintaining production, illustrating possible synergies among food security, livelihoods, and conservation.
Describes how biodiversity sustains agricultural ecosystems through soil fertility, pollination, pest regulation, genetic resources, climate resilience, income diversification, and dietary diversity, making conservation fundamental to future food systems.
Highlights the central role of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and aquaculture in implementing biodiversity commitments and encourages countries to integrate biodiversity-friendly production into national strategies.
Establishes actions for integrating biodiversity into agricultural policy and practice while supporting ecosystem services, food security, Indigenous peoples, local communities, gender equality, and sustainable production.
Describes international support for countries seeking to integrate agriculture and food systems into National Biodiversity Strategies while aligning production, conservation, food security, and the Global Biodiversity Framework.
Examines global food trade and suggests that trade patterns can sometimes reduce agricultural pressure on biodiversity-rich developing countries while helping meet food-security objectives, although outcomes depend strongly on geographic and economic conditions.
Reviews agricultural land-system research and demonstrates its relevance to numerous SDGs, particularly food security, ecosystem management, land sustainability, environmental quality, and climate adaptation.
Develops a framework linking agriculture, biodiversity, climate change, and international trade and identifies research priorities needed to build food systems capable of supporting both human nutrition and ecological sustainability.
Documents the importance and continuing decline of biodiversity supporting agriculture, emphasizing its role in soil health, pollination, pest control, climate resilience, productive ecosystems, livelihoods, food security, and nutrition.
Reviews plant genetic resources, dietary diversity, multifunctional landscapes, ecosystem services, gender, local communities, and economic valuation, showing why biodiversity is essential to sustainable and nutritionally diverse food systems.
Presents an agrobiodiversity framework spanning ecology, governance, nutrition, health, environmental change, and socioeconomic systems, emphasizing the importance of multiple knowledge systems in building sustainable and resilient agriculture.
Argues that sustainable food production depends on agricultural biodiversity and the ecosystem services it supplies and that these contributions deserve greater attention in global biodiversity assessments and development planning.
Explains how genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity support crop production, livestock, fisheries, pollination, soil fertility, pest regulation, water cycling, food security, nutrition, and resilience throughout global agrifood systems.
Biodiversity, Water, Food, Human Health, and Well-Being
Synthesizes nearly two thousand studies and shows that biodiversity frequently underpins positive interactions among water, food, health, and climate systems while unsustainable food production and climate change create major trade-offs.
Uses data from 174 countries to examine links between biodiversity decline and human health and finds particularly important effects through environmental degradation and malnutrition in lower-income countries.
Explains how ecosystem protection and restoration can jointly address biodiversity decline, climate risks, disease prevention, health-system resilience, and well-being through stronger cross-sector planning and investment.
Examines relationships among agriculture, land use, water resources, and ecological condition in the Lake Victoria Basin and identifies management factors important for regional sustainability and human well-being.
Reviews evidence connecting diversity in foods and food species with dietary quality, human health, environmental impacts, and more sustainable food systems.
Identifies gaps in monitoring the biodiversity-health relationship and proposes indicators that could help governments integrate ecosystem condition, health outcomes, and environmental policy.
Links wildlife conservation with health, food security, poverty reduction, livelihoods, zoonotic-disease prevention, and Indigenous and community-based resource management.
Provides guidance for integrating health into ecosystem restoration, green infrastructure, sustainable land use, climate adaptation, and biodiversity policy while emphasizing preventive health benefits and resilient communities.
Maps interactions among food systems, water resources, and biodiversity in India and finds biodiversity highly connected to development decisions throughout the wider resource-management system.
Reviews interactions among biodiversity and six major development sectors and argues for integrated policy because decisions in one system can generate substantial consequences for others.
Compiles guidance demonstrating that healthy ecosystems and biodiversity contribute to clean air, water, healthy soils, food, climate resilience, disaster-risk reduction, disease prevention, nutrition, medicine, and human well-being.
Provides a global assessment of interactions among biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate and identifies integrated policy approaches capable of producing multiple sustainable-development benefits.
Examines structural causes of biodiversity decline and evaluates societal, economic, institutional, technological, and behavioral transformations that could create development pathways compatible with nature.
Reviews the consequences of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation for water, food safety, infectious disease, pharmaceuticals, mental health, climate vulnerability, and the health of present and future generations.
Investigates how interactions with different species and biological traits contribute to physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual well-being, illustrating an often-overlooked human benefit of conserving biodiversity.
Explains biodiversity's contributions to food, fibre, water, climate resilience, human health, employment, and other development goals and argues that effective implementation of the 2030 Agenda depends on healthy ecosystems.
Synthesizes links between biodiversity, ecosystem stability, infectious disease, nutrition, medicines, water, climate regulation, mental health, and other dimensions of human health relevant to sustainable development.
Explains how functioning ecosystems supply clean air, water, medicines, food, shelter, disease regulation, climate stabilization, cultural values, and livelihoods while biodiversity decline can worsen health and socioeconomic instability.
Describes sustainable development as an integrated health and environmental objective and highlights how greener development policies can reduce pollution, climate risks, disease, stress, and other threats to long-term human well-being.
Climate Resilience, Water, and Nature-Based Solutions
Provides ecological recommendations for ensuring nature-based solutions protect biodiversity through attention to connectivity, ecological succession, invasive species, landscape diversity, monitoring, and adaptive management.
Synthesizes evidence on reciprocal relationships among nature-based solutions, biodiversity, and climate change while highlighting both benefits and potential ecological or social trade-offs resulting from poorly designed interventions.
Reviews nature-based approaches to mitigation and adaptation, including ecosystem restoration, carbon sequestration, flood regulation, food and water security, biodiversity protection, and improved resilience of human communities.
Explains how protecting, restoring, and sustainably managing ecosystems can simultaneously address climate change, biodiversity decline, water quality, pollution, desertification, land degradation, human well-being, and multiple Sustainable Development Goals.
Connects plant ecology and biodiversity–ecosystem-function science with the design of nature-based solutions capable of providing carbon storage, resilience, ecosystem services, climate adaptation, and benefits to people.
Reviews the knowledge, governance, and financing conditions needed to scale nature-based solutions capable of supporting biodiversity protection, ecosystem restoration, climate adaptation, and wider sustainable-development objectives.
Assesses whether climate-adaptation projects using nature-based solutions also support ecosystem health and biodiversity and identifies significant evidence gaps that must be addressed as these interventions expand.
Reviews hundreds of studies documenting how forests, wetlands, vegetation, and other ecosystems can reduce hazards and disaster risks while generating additional ecological and socioeconomic benefits.
Examines opportunities and constraints surrounding nature-based climate solutions and argues that ecological science, social safeguards, governance, and biodiversity considerations are necessary if these approaches are to contribute genuinely to sustainable development.
Argues that sustainable water security depends on ecological integrity and that healthy freshwater ecosystems provide essential, cost-effective public services supporting water supply, sanitation, health, infrastructure, and economic development.
Ecosystem Restoration and Sustainable Development
Examines efforts to integrate land restoration, climate action, and biodiversity conservation through coherent national policy, financing, implementation, and nature-based solutions across the three Rio Conventions.
Explores how artificial intelligence and improved project assessment could help attract investment to landscape restoration while supporting biodiversity, clean water, employment, ecosystem services, and rural development.
Argues that biodiversity should be a core objective of ecosystem restoration rather than a secondary benefit, showing that biologically diverse restoration can improve carbon sequestration, agricultural productivity, erosion control, hydrological services, timber production, and human health.
Reviews the role of ecosystem restoration in reversing biodiversity loss and land degradation while improving ecosystem services and human well-being, emphasizing the need to tailor restoration approaches to rapidly changing ecological and socioeconomic conditions.
Examines how nature-based solutions can address biodiversity loss, climate change, food and water insecurity, disaster risk, and human health while identifying governance, finance, safeguards, and implementation challenges.
Presents biodiversity and ecosystem protection as central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and links nature action with climate policy, sustainable food systems, pollution reduction, and wider socioeconomic development.
Explains the internationally agreed definition of nature-based solutions and their role in addressing social, economic, and environmental challenges while delivering biodiversity, ecosystem-service, resilience, and human-well-being benefits.
Makes the development case for restoring degraded ecosystems, arguing that large-scale restoration can improve biodiversity, food security, water supplies, livelihoods, climate resilience, health, and economic prosperity.
Establishes principles for restoration that improve biodiversity and ecosystem services while incorporating local conditions, societal choices, stakeholder participation, monitoring, adaptive management, and long-term sustainability.
Explains the economic and ecological benefits of recovering degraded forests, wetlands, grasslands, freshwater systems, marine areas, and agricultural landscapes, including improved biodiversity, productivity, carbon storage, and ecosystem services.
Forests, Land, Cities, and Sustainable Infrastructure
Highlights biodiversity and natural capital as foundations of economic systems, climate resilience, and human well-being and calls for better integration of ecological processes into regional and urban planning.
Summarizes global forest-governance progress and emphasizes forests as a foundation for biodiversity protection, climate resilience, ecosystem restoration, food security, livelihoods, and implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Reviews community-based forest conservation as a strategy for maintaining biodiversity, ecosystem services, food security, climate resilience, and rural livelihoods, with particular attention to challenges facing communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Reviews how urban biodiversity can increase climate resilience, health, liveability, and ecosystem services and calls for biodiversity-sensitive, socially inclusive urban governance and blue-green infrastructure.
Examines how forest biodiversity supplies water, energy, grazing, soil fertility, pollination, climate regulation, and other services crucial to rural livelihood security and inclusive economic development.
Reviews the drivers and governance of deforestation and considers how forest protection and restoration can simultaneously support climate action, biodiversity recovery, ecosystem services, and sustainable development.
Explains how mountain biodiversity supports food, water, livelihoods, safety, and ecosystem services far beyond mountain regions and argues that development policy must address both local and distant drivers of biodiversity loss.
Warns that expanding forest area through monoculture plantations may fail to restore biodiversity and calls for restoration policies that prioritize ecological quality, species diversity, and ecosystem function.
Examines opportunities for biodiversity-friendly cities and describes how urban nature can provide regulating, provisioning, and cultural ecosystem services while improving human well-being and environmental sustainability.
Shows that infrastructure decisions influence most Sustainable Development Goal targets and argues that long-term planning must account for environmental impacts, social outcomes, resilience, and ecological sustainability.
Cities, Infrastructure, and the Energy Transition
Analyzes relationships among green development finance, renewable-energy expansion, and biodiversity conservation across African countries and considers how financing can support cleaner development without increasing ecological damage.
Examines how biodiversity models can support urban planning and management decisions intended to maintain wildlife, ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services, and quality of life in cities.
Uses global urban data to examine how urban growth directly and indirectly affects biodiversity and identifies implications for environmentally sustainable city development.
Reviews economic and social benefits of road expansion alongside fragmentation, biodiversity loss, human-wildlife conflict, livelihood change, and other environmental costs in rapidly developing African landscapes.
Examines pastoralist views of renewable-energy projects and argues that wildlife-friendly solar and wind development should incorporate local ecological knowledge and socioeconomic needs.
Reviews how urban stormwater systems, vegetation, ponds, green roofs, and other blue-green infrastructure can be designed both to serve people and to create functioning habitats for biodiversity.
Examines how governments can expand renewable electricity while avoiding or minimizing damage to habitats, species, ecosystems, and biodiversity through better planning, siting, assessment, mitigation, and regulation.
Proposes a planning framework that integrates biodiversity, future climate-driven species-range changes, renewable-energy potential, and community consultation when deciding where new energy projects should be developed.
Presents a framework for cities to measure their ecological impacts and progress on biodiversity, water quality, urban expansion, green space, and other indicators of sustainable urban development.
Calls for infrastructure and biodiversity planning to be integrated rather than managed separately and highlights natural infrastructure as a means of delivering both development services and ecological benefits.
Oceans, Fisheries, Tourism, and Coastal Livelihoods
Examines how Indigenous community-based fisheries management can support Indonesia's blue-economy objectives by combining ecological sustainability, biodiversity conservation, employment, livelihoods, and sustainable use of marine resources.
Uses long-term ecological and economic data to examine interactions among fisheries biodiversity, fishing pressure, incomes, poverty reduction, ecosystem recovery, food production, and livelihood sustainability along Kenya's coast.
Examines investment in protected areas and nature-based tourism as a way of generating jobs, diversifying rural economies, financing conservation, and sharing the economic benefits of natural assets with local communities.
Assesses contributions of ten Kenyan coastal fisheries to twelve Sustainable Development Goals, demonstrating how fisheries can simultaneously influence employment, food security, economic development, communities, and marine conservation.
Reviews evidence on ecotourism as a strategy for linking biodiversity conservation with community livelihoods and sustainable local development while identifying conditions that determine whether ecological and economic benefits actually occur.
Reviews livelihood diversification in fishing communities and evaluates whether alternative economic opportunities can reduce fishing pressure, vulnerability, and poverty while improving ecological and socioeconomic sustainability.
Demonstrates the importance of inland fisheries for nutrition, employment, livelihoods, freshwater ecosystems, and multiple SDGs and argues that their contributions are frequently overlooked in development policy.
Reviews thirty years of ecotourism research and examines whether tourism revenues, community development, protected areas, wildlife conservation, and local livelihoods actually generate the frequently claimed conservation-development win-win outcomes.
Highlights the dependence of billions of people on marine biodiversity and explains why sustainable fisheries and healthy coastal ecosystems are crucial for jobs, trade, food, nutrition, poverty reduction, and development.
Studies communities around Nepal's Chitwan National Park and finds that locally owned tourism can improve livelihoods, reduce pressure on natural resources, and strengthen support for biodiversity conservation.
Protected Areas, Tourism, and Local Livelihoods
Examines how wildlife conflict interacts with poverty, food security, access to services, climate stress, and livelihood vulnerability and argues for integrated conservation and development responses.
Reviews community stewardship of mountain forests and finds that conservation success depends heavily on equity, participation, traditional ecological knowledge, governance quality, livelihoods, and ecosystem-service benefits.
Assesses whether a community wildlife-management area is simultaneously delivering biodiversity conservation, livelihoods, local development, governance, and financial sustainability.
Uses experimental evidence from Colombia to show that ecotourism promotion can increase economic opportunities while reducing deforestation, illustrating a potential development-conservation synergy.
Examines the need to maintain both wildlife connectivity and livelihood connectivity as pastoralists and conservation areas respond to changing land use, climate pressures, and resource availability.
Reviews protected-area policy and finds continuing challenges involving community participation, resettlement, livelihoods, tourism, human-wildlife conflict, benefit sharing, and social impacts.
Examines wildlife tourism as a rural-development strategy and finds that equitable benefit sharing, conflict compensation, local employment, and conservation governance strongly influence community support.
Argues that protected-area management should recognize both monetary and non-monetary community economies, including cultural ecosystem services that conventional valuation often overlooks.
Shows how dependence on nature tourism can create socioeconomic vulnerability and argues for environmentally sustainable livelihood diversification around conservation areas.
Develops practical wildlife-use indicators intended to strengthen local management and monitoring of hunting beyond formal protected areas while supporting sustainable use and biodiversity conservation.
Biodiversity Finance, Economics, and Investment
Reviews public, private, and blended biodiversity-finance mechanisms and identifies policy, regulatory, data, metrics, and project-pipeline conditions necessary to direct substantially more capital toward nature.
Examines barriers preventing vulnerable countries from accessing climate and biodiversity finance and calls for more coherent, coordinated, and locally responsive financing systems capable of converting international commitments into country-level development outcomes.
Reviews hundreds of studies on biodiversity finance and examines how financial mechanisms can be better aligned with conservation, sustainable development, and the particular institutional needs of emerging economies.
Finds that announcements of public biodiversity funding can affect investor expectations and stock-market valuations, suggesting government finance may also operate as a signal that encourages private nature investment.
Examines how development cooperation can encourage private investment in biodiversity-friendly businesses, sustainable production, restoration, green finance, and nature-positive economic activity in developing countries.
Reviews the development of biodiversity-focused financial markets, instruments, and investment opportunities while examining why capital remains far below the levels necessary to halt and reverse global nature loss.
Compares global investment in nature-based solutions with far larger financial flows supporting nature-negative economic activities and argues for redirecting capital toward biodiversity, restoration, climate resilience, and sustainable land management.
Reviews how biodiversity loss can affect firms, credit markets, sovereign risk, asset pricing, and financial-system stability and identifies gaps in the emerging nature-risk literature.
Examines connections among biodiversity exposure, corporate performance, supply-chain concentration, technology, governance, and financial risk using evidence from listed companies.
Compares commercial biodiversity-risk metrics with the ENCORE natural-capital framework and evaluates their usefulness and limitations for financial analysis and investment decision-making.
Examines biodiversity-focused stock indexes and finds that investors may be able to support companies with stronger biodiversity performance without necessarily sacrificing competitive financial returns.
Develops a framework for private and blended biodiversity finance, examining how financial returns, risk, and measurable biodiversity impacts interact when private, public, and philanthropic capital finance conservation and restoration.
Tracks global financing for ecosystem restoration and compares existing investment with the much larger financial requirement for achieving international restoration, climate, and biodiversity objectives.
Maps research on conservation finance, payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity offsets, green bonds, sustainable tourism, and other mechanisms while identifying significant gaps in innovative finance and social considerations.
Tracks official and private development finance contributing to biodiversity and evaluates progress toward Target 19 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, including finance for climate, Indigenous peoples, communities, and gender equality.
Examines biodiversity-related finance from bilateral donors, multilateral institutions, South-South cooperation, philanthropy, and private investment while identifying opportunities to accelerate implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
Discusses the growing effort to incorporate nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities into corporate disclosure and financial decision-making.
Reviews ten years of biodiversity-related development finance and considers how international funding can better contribute to conservation, sustainable use, ecosystem restoration, and sustainable-development priorities in developing countries.
Analyzes international development finance directed toward biodiversity objectives, including bilateral and multilateral flows, private finance mobilization, philanthropy, and progress toward international resource-mobilization commitments.
Presents the economic case for reversing biodiversity loss, examining ecosystem-service dependencies, business and financial risks, biodiversity finance, measurement gaps, and policy priorities for moving economic activity toward nature-positive outcomes.
Corporate Biodiversity Risk and Accountability
Assesses biodiversity pledges among highly influential corporations and finds that although commitments are increasingly common, only a small proportion are sufficiently specific and transparent to permit meaningful accountability.
Reviews biodiversity-finance concepts, instruments, actors, markets, and challenges and considers how financial mechanisms can generate measurable conservation and restoration outcomes without overstating ecological benefits.
Synthesizes hundreds of studies on biodiversity-related physical and transition risks, financial exposure, asset pricing, corporate vulnerability, and systemic risks to financial markets.
Finds that businesses with greater biodiversity-risk exposure receive less supplier financing, showing how ecological degradation can propagate through commercial relationships and supply chains.
Examines how biodiversity risk weakens supply-chain resilience through financing mismatches, agency costs, limited diversification, and other vulnerabilities affecting corporate operations.
Finds that stronger corporate and national governance arrangements are associated with more extensive biodiversity reporting across companies operating in multiple countries.
Finds that banks can inherit biodiversity-related risk from borrowers and that lenders increasingly incorporate corporate exposure to nature-related risks into credit pricing.
Reviews the rapidly developing intersection of finance and biodiversity and identifies research priorities involving corporate strategies, measurement, reporting, financial decision-making, stakeholder engagement, and empirical assessment.
Evaluates biodiversity reporting by European financial institutions and finds that disclosure practices remain relatively immature despite growing recognition of nature-related risks and regulatory expectations.
Finds that relatively few major corporations comprehensively assess their dependencies and impacts on natural capital, suggesting a large gap between corporate sustainability rhetoric and substantive biodiversity action.
Nature-Positive Development, Natural Capital, and Bioeconomy
Argues that economies and societies exist within natural systems and calls for development models, accounting systems, financial incentives, conservation, Indigenous participation, and investment strategies capable of halting and reversing nature loss.
Examines Uganda's efforts to reform subsidies and fiscal incentives so that economic-development policies support rather than undermine biodiversity, natural resources, livelihoods, and long-term prosperity.
Provides guidance for financial institutions and businesses seeking to assess their dependencies and impacts on nature and incorporate biodiversity-related risks and opportunities into financial decision-making.
Presents biodiversity finance as an investment in economic resilience, food systems, tourism, water resources, livelihoods, and national prosperity and describes efforts to integrate nature into development financing in The Gambia.
Argues that a future bioeconomy must be intentionally designed around circularity, biodiversity, resource security, climate mitigation, food security, social inclusion, employment, competitiveness, and health.
Examines biodiversity loss as a financial and economic risk and describes how banks, insurers, investors, disclosure systems, and biodiversity finance can support resilient, nature-positive economic growth.
Reviews knowledge gaps affecting biodiversity governance and emphasizes combining scientific research, Indigenous knowledge, local knowledge, monitoring, data sharing, education, and capacity building to improve conservation and sustainable development.
Explains why conservation, ecological restoration, and sustainable natural-resource use must operate together to maintain the terrestrial, freshwater, coastal, and marine ecosystems supporting development and livelihoods.
Explains how financial policy, investment, banking, insurance, sustainable supply chains, restoration, regenerative agriculture, and biodiversity protection can be aligned with a nature-positive, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable economy.
Explains how natural-capital accounting can make biodiversity visible in economic decision-making and help countries pursue job creation, food security, climate resilience, inclusive growth, and sustainable management of natural resources.
Presents corporate strategies involving sustainable forestry, biodiversity conservation, supply-chain transparency, water stewardship, circularity, and other nature-positive practices intended to connect business competitiveness with ecosystem recovery.
Proposes a research framework for understanding how businesses can move from broad nature-positive commitments toward measurable changes in operations, value chains, impacts, and biodiversity outcomes.
Reviews biodiversity's contributions to ecosystem services, sustainable development, climate resilience, natural resources, conservation technologies, and emerging opportunities for using new technologies in biodiversity management.
Examines how bioeconomy strategies can support jobs, economic development, and climate objectives while warning that biodiversity and ecosystems must be safeguarded if bio-based development is to remain sustainable.
Argues that many bioeconomy strategies insufficiently address biodiversity and considers how a more restorative model could combine sustainable biological-resource use with conservation and human well-being.
Reviews corporate biodiversity commitments and argues that credible nature-positive strategies require measurable outcomes, organization-wide implementation, value-chain coverage, integration across environmental issues, and accountability.
Treats biodiversity loss as both a systemic development risk and an economic opportunity and outlines nature-smart approaches involving land, oceans, infrastructure, energy, extractives, livelihoods, and development planning.
Presents biodiversity loss as a development problem and proposes integrating nature into economic decision-making, infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, finance, conservation, local livelihoods, and development investment.
Uses integrated economic-ecosystem modelling to show how ecosystem degradation can affect global development and evaluates policies intended to reduce biodiversity loss while supporting resilient and inclusive economic growth.
Connects biodiversity and ecosystem health with jobs, fisheries, forests, tourism, community resilience, poverty reduction, economic growth, and natural capital while describing the disproportionate risks nature loss creates for poorer economies.
